garrison keillor

Order Blocks Harassment of Keillor
8 hours ago

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) ― Garrison Keillor has gotten a restraining order against a Georgia woman he claims has made telephone calls and sent him explicit e-mails and disturbing gifts, including a petrified alligator foot and dead beetles.

A Ramsey County District judge issued the order against Andrea R. Campbell, 43, of Hawkinsville, Ga., on Friday. Campbell said she received it Monday.

In the petition filed Oct. 12, Keillor, 65, claimed the harassment started April 28, after Campbell attended a live performance of his public radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion," in Columbus, Ga.

Keillor's filing said the e-mails and letters were often "disturbing, unintelligible and rambling," and in one, Campbell "graphically described making love to me."

He also alleged Campbell showed up at his home in St. Paul in July. His wife was startled awake early one morning by the sound of someone rustling around outside the family's house. She filed a police report.

Campbell denied the allegations in a telephone interview with the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She said she only wanted to show her gratitude for Keillor's work.

"I am unclear as to what the problem is," she said.

Campbell said Keillor had misunderstood the letters, e-mails, packages and phone calls. She said she was never closer to his house than the sidewalk.

"I believe that he's paranoid, or some woman, his wife, is upset and told him he has to do something about it," she said.

While Campbell said she loved Keillor, she also said it wasn't physical. She said she is a happily married woman with five children.

"It's transcendental love, that's all" she said. "Between a writer and a reader."

On the Net:
Order Blocks Harassment of KeillorThe Associated Press
- Oct 24, 2007
- 8 hours ago
(AP) ― Garrison Keillor has gotten a restraining order against a Georgia woman he claims has made telephone calls and sent him explicit e-mails and ...
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Garrison Keillor to Fan: Leave Me Alone! 10 hours ago
TMZ.com: Minnesota Public Radio author and host Garrison Keillor has been granted a restraining order against a wacky Georgia fan who has allegedly been harassing him since April. Keillor claims to have received email, ...

Garrison Keillor has a stalker, Halle in trouble over Leno joke ... 5 hours ago
Garrison Keillor. Garrison Keillor has gotten a restraining order against a Georgia woman he claims has made telephone calls and sent him explicit e-mails and disturbing gifts, including a petrified alligator foot and dead beetles. ...

Garrison Keillor Secures Restraining Order Against Georgia Woman 4 hours ago
Garrison Keillor Secures Restraining Order Against Georgia Woman.




A Prairie Home Companion from American Public Media
Garrison Keillor's long-running radio variety show, from Minnesota Public Radio.

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Garrison Keillor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, ...

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The Garrison Keillor Page
Welcome to the Garrison Keillor Page. An assemblage of information about Garrison Keillor including links to other Garrison Keillor sites. ...

Garrison Keillor
Garrison Keillor on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...

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More web results ? Garrison Keillor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor at a 2007 performance of A Prairie Home Companion in Lanesboro, Minnesota
Birth name Gary Edward Keillor
Born August 07, 1942 (1942-08-07) (age 65)
Anoka, Minnesota, United States
Medium Radio, Print
Nationality American
Years active 1969-present
Genres Observational comedy, Satire
Subject(s) American culture (esp. the Midwest); American politics
Spouse Mary Guntzel (1965-1976)
Ulla Skaerved 1985-1990
Jenny Lind Nilsson (1995-present)
Notable works and roles Himself, Guy Noir, Lefty, Bob Burger, and Lake Wobegon narrator in A Prairie Home Companion
Garrison Keillor (born Gary Edward Keillor on August 7, 1942 in Anoka, Minnesota) is an American author, storyteller, humorist, columnist, musician, satirist, and radio personality.

He is best known as host of the Minnesota Public Radio show A Prairie Home Companion (also known as Garrison Keillor's Radio Show on Britain's BBC 7, as well as on Australia's ABC and in Ireland).

Contents
1 Biography and personal life
1.1 Ancestors
2 Career
2.1 Radio
2.2 Writing
2.3 Bookselling
3 Awards and other recognition
4 Criticism
5 Voiceover work
6 Keillor parodied
7 Bibliography
7.1 Lake Wobegon
7.2 Other
8 References
9 External links



[edit] Biography and personal life
Keillor was born in Anoka, Minnesota, and raised in a family belonging to the Plymouth Brethren, a fundamentalist Christian denomination he has since left. He is six feet, four inches (1.93 m) tall and is of Scottish and Norwegian ancestry. Keillor is a member of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. He is currently an Episcopalian[1], but has been a Lutheran[2]. He often uses his religious roots in his material. He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in English in 1966. While there, he began his broadcasting career on the student-operated radio station known today as Radio K.

Keillor has been married three times:

To Mary Guntzel, from 1965 to 1976. The couple has one son, Jason, born in 1969.
To Ulla Skaerved (a former exchange student from Denmark whom he famously re-encountered at a high school reunion), from 1985 to 1990. Keillor is mildly notorious for having left his long-time lover and PHC producer Margaret Moos to marry Skaerved.
His current wife, violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson (b. 1958), from his hometown of Anoka, whom he married in 1995. They have one daughter, Maia, born in 1998.
The Keillors maintain homes on the Upper West Side of New York City and in St. Paul, Minnesota.


[edit] Ancestors
Keillor has many noteworthy ancestors, including Joseph Crandall (who made progress in the studies of Native American languages), who was also an associate of Roger Williams (who founded the first American Baptist church as well as Rhode Island) and Prudence Crandall (who founded the first African-American women's school in America).


[edit] Career

[edit] Radio

Keillor doing a live radio broadcast in the rain.Garrison Keillor started his radio career in November 1969 with Minnesota Educational Radio (MER), now Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). He hosted The Morning Program in the weekday drive time-slot, 6 am to 9 am, which the station called "A Prairie Home Entertainment." During this time he also began submitting fiction to The New Yorker, where his first story, "Local Family Keeps Son Happy," appeared September 19, 1970. [3]

Keillor resigned from The Morning Program in February 1971 to protest what he considered an attempt to interfere with his musical programming. The show became A Prairie Home Companion when he returned in October.[4]

Keillor has attributed the idea for the live Saturday night radio program to his 1973 assignment to write about the Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker, but he had already begun showcasing local musicians on the morning show, despite limited studio space for them, and in August 1973 The Minneapolis Tribune reported MER's plans for a Saturday night version of A Prairie Home Companion with live musicians. [4][5]

A Prairie Home Companion debuted as an old-style variety show before a live audience on July 6, 1974, featuring guest musicians and a cadre cast doing musical numbers and comic skits replete with elaborate live sound effects. The show was punctuated by spoof commercial spots from such fictitious sponsors as Jack's Auto Repair and Powdermilk Biscuits, "the biscuits that give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done." [4] Later imaginary sponsors have included Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery ("If you can't find it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it."), Bertha's Kitty Boutique, the Catchup Advisory Board[6] (which touted "the natural mellowing agents of ketchup"), the American Duct Tape Council, and Bebop-A-Reebop Rhubarb Pie ("sweetening the sour taste of failure through the generations"). The show also contains parodic serial melodramas, such as The Adventures of Guy Noir, Private Eye and The Lives of the Cowboys. After the show's intermission, Keillor reads clever and often humorous greetings to friends and family at home, submitted by members of the theater audience. Also in the second half of the show, the broadcasts showcased a weekly monologue by Keillor entitled News from Lake Wobegon, based in part on Keillor's own hometown of Anoka, Minnesota. Lake Wobegon is a quintessential but fictional Midwestern small town "where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." The first show was in 1974, and the program became successful. It ran until 1987, when Keillor decided to end it; he worked on other projects, including another live radio program, "The American Radio Company"--which was virtually identical in format to "A Prairie Home Companion"--for several years. In 1993 he began producing A Prairie Home Companion again, with nearly identically-formatted programs, and has done so since.[7] On A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor receives no billing or credit (except "written by Sarah Bellum", a joking reference to his own brain); his name is never mentioned, except occasionally by a guest addressing him by his first name or the initials "G. K."

Keillor is also the host of The Writer's Almanac which, like A Prairie Home Companion, is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The Writer's Almanac is also available online and via daily e-mail installments by subscription[8].


[edit] Writing
Keillor has written many magazine and newspaper articles, and nearly a dozen books for adults as well as children. In addition to his time as a writer for The New Yorker, he has also written for The Atlantic Monthly, and Salon.com.

He also authored an advice column on Salon.com, titled "Mr. Blue". Following a heart operation, he resigned on September 4, 2001 in an article entitled "Every dog has his day"[9]:

Illness offers the chance to think long thoughts about the future (praying that we yet have one, dear God), and so I have, and so this is the last column of Mr. Blue, under my authorship, for Salon. Over the years, Mr. Blue's strongest advice has come down on the side of freedom in our personal lives, freedom from crushing obligation and overwork and family expectations and the freedom to walk our own walk and be who we are. And some of the best letters have been addressed to younger readers trapped in jobs like steel suits, advising them to bust loose and go off and have an adventure. Some of the advisees have written back to inform Mr. Blue that the advice was taken and that the adventure changed their lives. This was gratifying. So now I am simply taking my own advice. Cut back on obligations: Promote a certain elegant looseness in life. Simple as that. Winter and spring, I almost capsized from work, and in the summer I had a week in St. Mary's Hospital to sit and think, and that's the result. Every dog has his day and I've had mine and given whatever advice was mine to give (and a little more). It was exhilarating to get the chance to be useful, which is always an issue for a writer (What good does fiction do?), and Mr. Blue was a way to be useful. Nothing human is beneath a writer's attention; the basic questions about how to attract a lover and what to do with one once you get one and how to deal with disappointment in marriage are the stuff that fiction is made from, so why not try to speak directly? And so I did. And now it's time to move on.

In June 2005, Keillor started a syndicated newspaper column called "The Old Scout." He returned to Salon.com, contributing a weekly essay, in 2005.

Keillor wrote the screenplay for the 2006 movie version of A Prairie Home Companion, which was directed by Robert Altman. (Keillor also appears in the movie.)

Keillor also recently published a collection of political essays as Homegrown Democrat.


[edit] Bookselling
On November 1, 2006, Keillor opened an independent bookstore in the historic Cathedral Hill area of Saint Paul, Minnesota. "Common Good Books, G. Keillor, Prop."[10] is located at the southwest corner of Selby and N. Western Avenues, (Blair Arcade Building, Suite 14, in the basement, below Nina's Coffee Cafe). The Cathedral Hill area is located in one of the St. Paul neighborhoods called Summit-University[11]. For coverage of the bookstore opening, see this article [12] which appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.


[edit] Awards and other recognition
In 1994, Keillor was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.[13]
"Welcome to Minnesota" markers in interstate rest areas near the state's borders include statements such as "Like its neighbors, the thirty-second state grew as a collection of small farm communities, many settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and Germany. Two of the nation's favorite fictional small towns -- Sinclair Lewis's Gopher Prairie and Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon -- reflect that heritage." [14]

[edit] Criticism
In 2007, Keillor wrote a column which, in part, criticized "stereotypical" gay parents, who he said were "sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers."[15] In response to the strong reactions of many readers, Keillor apologized, saying

I live in a small world...in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes.... But in the larger world, gayness is controversial...and so gay people feel besieged to some degree and rightly so.... My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding.[16].


[edit] Voiceover work
Due to his distinctive voice, Keillor is often used as a voiceover actor. Some notable appearances include:

Voiceover artist for Honda UK's "the Power of Dreams" campaign. The campaign's most memorable advert is the 2003 Honda Accord commercial entitled "Cog". The two minute television ad features a complex system of car parts that react with each other to create a chain reaction. The commercial ends with Keillor asking, "Isn't it nice when things just work?"[17] Since then, Keillor has voiced the tagline for most if not all Honda UK advertisements, and even sang the voiceover in the 2004 Honda Diesel commercial entitled "Grrr". His most recent advert was a reworking of an existing commercial with digitally added England flags to tie in with the World Cup. Keillor's tagline was "Come on England, keep the dream alive".
Keillor lent his voice to an animated version of the Norse god Odin in an episode of the Disney animated series "Hercules." His role as the chief god was no doubt influenced by his frequent references to his Norwegian ancestry, which he shares with many residents in the Midwest.
Keillor provided the voice of Walt Whitman in Ken Burns' documentary series The Civil War.
Keillor was featured in the Venue Songs of the band They Might Be Giants, supposedly inspiring John Flansburgh and John Linnell with "Midwestern Pledge Drive Funk"[18] songs he had written, like "When Doves Cry," "Powdermilk Biscuit Rain," and "Factory's A-Closin' in the Quaint Fictional Lutheran Town."[19]

[edit] Keillor parodied
His style, particularly his speaking voice, is often the subject of parody. The Simpsons parodies Keillor in an episode where Homer is shown watching a Keillor-like monologist on television, and upon hitting the set, exclaiming "Stupid TV! Be more funny!", which has become one of The Simpsons' oft-quoted catchphrases.[20] In practice, Keillor rarely reads his monologue directly from the script, but the monotonous intonation and style of dress caricature Keillor successfully. One Boston radio critic likens Keillor and his "down comforter voice" to "a hypnotist intoning, 'You are getting sleepy now'", while noting that Keillor does play to listeners' intelligence.[21]


[edit] Bibliography